Vojtìch V. Sláma, Vlèí med+ 22.5.-6.9.09

Me and photography?
Photography instead of writing
A silent companion
Metal covered with skin
A ticket to a journey
To immortality
Focal epilepsy
A woman, a child
A lover in silver
Emulsion in the heart
Developer instead of blood
Great happiness
And the time and price you pay
Which do not heal
Vojtìch V. Sláma

Also this is the way

The truth does not exist. It is relative – as anything else. The truth of arts? It does not exist and to search for it nowadays is in the least an expression of naivety. Pathetically speaking, the anchor of arts has fallen down from the heights to the ground, getting stuck somewhere in the middle of the society or – in the worst case – of the crowd. It seems we are the central point of things. Images are rolling along with the stream, being a part of one big adventure… Vojtìch Sláma stands aside, on the bank, as he does not believe; he does not believe the speed or the adventure, seeing his way. In his landscape, things are done differently. No idyll, everything just as it should be; people have time for themselves; and have time to see and to experience. And such is their photographer, too. He knows the value of an instant, knows how to snatch it, retrieve it again and save it; perhaps for hard times, when it will be necessary to reach deeper into the stock. Vojtìch Sláma’s images exist at their own pace, lumbering through the world in the same way as Alvin Straight’s grass-mower. Slowly, neatly, without fanfares, yet with a trace left behind.
October 20, 2005 Jiøí Pátek



Public Privacy
of Vojta Sláma

Now and then I had been meeting Vojta Sláma from his childhood; the whole of his great family operated within and around the Brno alternative scene. Later I encountered him as my student at the Secondary School of Arts and Crafts in Brno, where he was fretting about my low pedagogical self-esteem, teaching me tolerance (he repeatedly fell asleep in the class). What I especially liked about him was certain stubbornness; he did not lack self-confidence either. Both these qualities came in handy among his friends in two particularly strong years, out of which originated the Czech Parallax group. In it, he found his way in as a generative author as well as a skilled organizer. Contours of his artistic “construction” began to be gradually revealed. In accordance with the rest of the group, when taking pictures he was using double-eyed reflex cameras, blowing up the photos to square formats; he was one of the first admirers of the 60s (and soon also the 70s and the 30s…); many of his pictures seemed to me, however, extraordinarily sincere, and also less dazzling, stylized and fashionable.

The group does not actually exist for several years now, which is a pity, particularly for its audience — the Czech Parallax was able to attune to and entertain the audience in a great manner (additional thanks!). Where does the whole abandoned sect of the Parallax-confessors wander nowadays?

I do not know how the common orientation came to develop in the Czech Parallax. As far as I remember, the group eventually benefited from thematization of banality and kitsch. Some succeeded in playing with “low art”, others sometimes slipped to that level, over which they intended to levitate, but sometimes there were pictures finding the real meaning of simple motifs and ordinariness. The latter often originated in Sláma’s camera. Today, the group, which had helped him to find himself, was transformed into a certain reception background of his photos. It is not, however, the only context that is relevant in his case.

There is, for instance, the tradition of banality. From the times of the Biedermeier period at the latest, it is platitude or seeming meaninglessness that — being its principal artery — has fed the artistic imagination in our country. Sláma tries to make use of his imagination as little as possible. In my opinion he does not want anything else than to capture the living in his life: festive moments, previsions, enchanting, beauty, happiness, regret… In this aspect as well as in emphasizing his personal involvement he is close to Boøek Sousedík or Milan Pitlach, who are one generation older.

Life is banal quite often. All our lives cannot be identical, and so life is — from the outer perspective — ordinary. There are photographers who, in this stage of recognition, through which all people have to go, apply imagination (which is usually even more boring). But Sláma uniquely takes pictures of his own life and of what he has recognized and understood. He tries to avoid impropriating anything that is not his own. Quite in an old-fashioned manner, he seems to believe in authenticity; in it he could be a descendant of the parental existentialist generation. Only the life feeling of that time is not his. Thanks to his stubbornness he fortunately managed to picture his own. His perceptions are sometimes visually attractive and so they almost veil the meaning of his work. But Sláma does not allow anything to seduce him — he is not a producer of visually dazzling shots about nothing. The viewer usually has to penetrate to the core of his photos, because they are about the world and not about their creator.

When we perceive Sláma’s work in a wider context, it is the ethos connected with it that excels. Sláma is a serious artist and he seems to interweave his life with his work. He resists every superficiality, and the moments he takes his photos of have often a flavor of solemnity. All this contributes to the value of his shots thanks to the connection with his talent and his experience of photographic vision (a mere personal zeal does not guarantee anything). In comparison with the preceding generation, he managed to be more modest and that is why he finds other “pearls on the sea bed” of everyday life.

Vojta Sláma, owing to his concentration, has already circumscribed his own place in the context of present-day photography. In Jan Svoboda’s pictures, the personal world also prevails; it has served him, however, as a material of artistic visions. Jan Svoboda, Miroslav Machotka and perhaps some others provided Sláma with a hint at some of the possibilities how to picture the static world of nature and civilization. In sharp contrast with Sláma is the last wave of photographers, who reflect everyday life with conceptual distance (let us recall Markéta Othová among others) and who focus only on the context of present-day fine art. As far as the so called subjective documentary is concerned, it is the minute craft and the regard for photographic tradition in general that is the common denominator shared also by Sláma; it is different, however, in the fact that subjectivity, such as a mere estranging perspective, is not a good reason for Sláma to publish the picture. This is the real, though invisible border, by which he earns citizenship with serious artists. Photography is a view from the outside, not an internal vision. Nevertheless, Sláma remains an artist who provides his personal guarantee for the “technical pictures” from his camera.

Antonín Dufek